Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Pleasures of Eighteenth-Century Desert Travel According to Henry Abbott

This article deals with eighteenth-century textual representations, focusing on the genre of travel writing. It is dedicated to “Mickey, who loved to travel”. The study considers a defense of desert travelling as advanced by Abbott in his accounts of the pleasures derived both from the Aleppo- Bassora journey and from the act of writing about it. It is this latter type of pleasure
that is seen as further branching into three parts: correcting false ideas, offering advice and describing personal experiences.